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knowing things unless the active intellect keeps on enlightening it. Now observe. What the active intellect does for the natural man that and far more does God do for the solitary soul : he turns out active intellect and installing himself in its stead he himself assumes the duties of the active intellect.

When a man is quite idle, when his intellect is at rest within him, then God takes up the work : he himself is the agent who produces himself in the passive intellect. What happens is this. The active intellect cannot give what it has not got : it cannot have two ideas together, but first one and then the other. What though light and air sliow multitudes of forms and colours all at once, thou canst only observe them one after another. And so with thy active intellect, which resembles the eye. But when God acts in lieu of thy active intellect he engenders many images together in one point. Suppose God prompts thee to some one good deed, thy powers are all proffered for all virtuous things, thy mind being straightway set on good in general. All thy possibilities for good take shape and come into thy mind collectively, focussed to one point. Clearly this is not the work of thine own intellect which has in no wise the perfection nor plenitude for it ; rather is it the work and product of him who has all forms at once in himself. As Paul says : ‘ I can do all things in him who strengtheneth me ; in him I am undivided.’ Know then, the ideas of these acts are not thine own : they belong to the author of thy nature who has planted therein both their energy and form. Lay no claim thereto, for it is his not thine. True, thou rcccivest it temporally, but it is gotten and born of God beyond time', in eternity above images.

Thou wilt say, perhaps : From the moment my intellect is divested of its natural activity and no longer has either form or action of its own, what is preserving it ? It must have a hold somewhere ; the powers, whether memory, intellect or will, are bound to have some lodgment somewhere, some place to work in.

The answer is this. Intellect’s object and sustenance is essence, not accident, just pure unadulterated being in itself. On descrying something real the intellect forthwith relics upon it, comes to rest thereon, pronouncing its intellectual word concerning the object attained. As long as intellect fails to find the actual truth of things, does not touch bedrock in them, it stays in a condition of quest and expectation, it never settles down to rest, but labours incessantly to trace things to their cause, that is, it is seeking and waiting. It spends perhaps a year or more in research on some natural fact, finding out what it is, only to work as long again stripping off what it is not. All this time it has nothing to go by, it makes no pronouncement at all in the absence of experimental knowledge of the ground of truth. Intellect never rests in this

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